Saturday, June 6, 2009

HOTT Campaign Weekend Kick-off!

Friday night, just to get things going we started with a BIG BATTLE HOTT game. The three Orcs and the Dwarves on ones side (which was referred to as the D’orc alliance all night…), The three Humans with the elves on the other. Just some quick pics and commentary as the players will soon be here to kick off the campaign proper…

(all armies, except Mr. Tim Miller's goblins, were provided by me...)

(Remember: click on the pictures for a bigger version)The “Good Guys” (L to R) Cory, Rick, Terry, and Chris

Chris here had never played HOTT before this evening! Neither had Terry.

The Lines move forward

Slowly…

Tim (Orcs), Bob (Dwarves) and Christian (Orcs)

Goodies on the left, Baddies on the right. Already mixing it up on the flanks!

Cory’s Anglo-Saxon’s and Christian’s Orcs still eyeing each other up while Rick’s Elves and Jackson’s Orcs are busy hammering on each other!

Dwarves, Orcs and Humans again at the other end of the table.

Christian’s Behemoths make first contact.

CRUNCH! The Saxon and Orc Battle lines finally clash!

Dwarves and Vikings are still skirmishin while the Orcs and Normans have been going at it hammer and tongs for a while…

I don’t know how many turns this giant (Behemoth) pushed back this line of Blades and archers. The behemoth and Blades being the principle combatants, IN WOODS(!?), The combat factors were usually +1 vs. +1… and they just kept on fighting…

The mail lines of the Elves and Jackson’s Orcs meet!

Mr. Miller had an evening of incredible bad luck…

I think this is the turn before Jackson and Rick’s respective Hero Generals went at it – Jackson’s being the loser. The game went quickly downhill thereafter.

The map was painted on a 1/4" MDF board and was about 18"x15". There'll be pics up tomorrow of the markers moving about on it... Though in all the excitement I don't think I took pics of EACH years movements...

Looks like a great game. Do I understand correctly that you played this entire game, with 6 players, including some newbies, in a few hours only? Looks like these rules work a lot faster than GW? How about magic, is it implemented? What is your opinion about warhammer vs hott rulesets?

Eight players actually... Two had never played DBA or Hordes of the Things before in their lives, One had played DBA but not HOTT (there are a few differences).

I like HOTT better than Warhammer. I'm not saying HOTT IS better than WH - because it's purely a matter of taste. The systems are really quite different. HOTT is very simple and somewhat abstract and you don't need very many figures for an army. WH is very detailed.

In HOTT troops are defined purely by how they fought or were used in battle rather than a long line of statistics, a list of their specific weapons and armaments and an endless list of special abilities and rules... In HOTT a "Blade" stand can be anything from Dwarf Axemen to Roman Legionnaires to Elves with Greatswords to heavily armoured Uruk-hai with sword and shield to Medieval Halbardiers... they all share the same "attributes" - they are all heavy infantry that close with the enemy and fight in close combat and are pretty resiliant and hard-hitting versus other foot troops... So they preform exactly the same in the game.

Magic is also simple and quite abstracted. There are no spell lists to choose from - magicians simply do a "magic attack" - could be lightning, fireballs, great gusts of wind, an earthquake under the target unit... whatever you want it to be - it all works the same in the game and is sort of like high-powered, long range artillery that is particularly effective against large monsterous things ("behemoths") heroic characters, other magicians, etc, but is somwhat diminished by the presence of paladins or clerics...

It was also a great bunch of guys playing together so there was no arguing - this was haelped by the fact that the system i elegant in it's simplicity and there was no time sent looking at the other guys army book trying to understand how his big crazy war machine or monster actually works and if it's really allowed to eat your whole army without you being able to do a damn thing about it like he says it is...